I don't know about that, and it depends how it's implemented. HN broadcasts the fact that it hellbans users. There's even a toggle in your profile to see the p

I don't know about that, and it depends how it's implemented. HN broadcasts the fact that it hellbans users. There's even a toggle in your profile to see the posts of the damned. HN also seems to gratuitously hellban people - if someone isn't hellbanned for being an obvious troll, sometimes they seem to be hellbanned over lightweight snark or nothing at all. HN even has its own notoriously hellbanned "HN celebrity": the creator of Temple OS. It's no secret. Yet every day I notice hellbanned posts where the user has been hellbanned for some time now and they do not notice. On my forum, I only hellban users so uncontroversially egregious (bots, spammers, and people who only post to pilfer value from the community) that nobody notices or would care if they did. To "expose" the system, a user would pretty much have to create a topic like this: "Hey everyone, you don't know me because I've been trying to PM new users with links to my competing forum for half a year, but I just found out that nobody has been receiving my PMs because I've been hellbanned. Help me protest this system!"